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The Light Shaper: the magazine cover setup

Andrea Belluso is an experienced photographer with more than three decades in the business. Over the years, he has shot everything and everyone from supermodels and celebrities to fashion, beauty and stock photography.
Once a month Andrea shares one of his most recent setups. (Previous setups can be found here.) This month he is stepping up the game by presenting his very first The Light Shaper video. Hope you like it!

Setup: The Magazine Cover Setup

Perfect when: Shooting a famous singer

But also when: You want a soft and crispy light

The assignment: I was asked by beauty magazine Daisy Beautyto do a cover shoot with Swedish singer Emilia de Poret. The brief was simple: keep it simple but try to make the image stick out of the crowd of commercial magazine covers. The editor specifically asked for a portrait with a bit of a sidelight, but with a nice beauty feeling to it and not over the top. Emilia is known for her immense wardrobe of designer clothes, so she styled herself for the shoot.

The setup: Using the Softlight Kit to achieve this effect felt like the most natural thing to do. There are not many tools out there that can compete with the Softlight Reflector White when it comes to creating a nice beauty feeling on the skin. There is a reason it is nicknamed the Beauty Dish! Having the entire kit at my disposal, including diffusors and grids, meant that I had a much wider range of possibilities compared to working with only the reflector. I even added the optional frosted glass deflector to my toolbox for even more possibilities.

Flash wise, I used three D1 monolights. I have to say, I love working with the D1. It’s easy to transport, it is easy to set up, and the light quality is comparable with that of the studio generators that I’m used to using. In addition, the D1 can be used with almost any Profoto Light Shaping Tool as well as the convenient Air Remote. Ok, so it might not have the extreme short flash duration or superfast recharging time that a high-end studio generator does, but that is, on other hand, not something I require on shoots such a this.

On a final note, I’d just like to say that I hope you like this video as much as I do. It is the first in a series of The Light Shaper videos demonstrating what you can achieve with the D1 monolight and how to do it, so stay tuned!

Leave a comment below if you have any questions, and I’ll do my best to reply as soon as I can!